Saturday, September 6, 2014

Beslan’s youngest survivor and her rescuer meet 10 years after tragedy

A
Russian police officer carries a released baby from the school seized by
heavily armed masked men and women in the town of Beslan in the
province of North Ossetia near Chechnya, September 2, 2004.(Reuters /
Viktor Korotayev)

This image has been seen by millions around the world
– a special forces officer takes a six-month girl to safety out of the
besieged school in Russia’s Beslan, North Ossetia. Ten years later,
Rossiyskaya Gazeta has found the baby and her savior.

Alyona Tskayeva is now 10 years and six months old. The windows
of her apartment overlook what remains of the school building
where she and Makhar were held hostage for three days. That’s her
new home and her new family – her second mother Svetlana, father
Ruslan, brothers Makhar and Georgy and her little sister
Kristina. Kristina is now 10 months. She was named after Alyona’s
elder sister who died under the debris of the gym after the blast
together with her mother Fatima.

Children, their parents and teachers all came to the school to
mark the beginning of the academic year. Fatima took her older
daughter Kristina, three-year-old Makhar and six-month-old
Alyona. She carried Alyona in one arm while the son held her by
the other hand. The older daughter shone proudly in the center of
the schoolyard festooned with bundles of balloons.

The four of them ended up in the hands of the terrorists. Makhar
has been haunted by nightmares ever since. Even today, 10 years
on, he can still remember what happened in the gym packed with
explosives. He can remember how his mom handed over Alyona to
someone and remained with them inside the gym.

It happened on September 2. Ex-president of Ingushetia Ruslan
Aushev stepped in and began negotiations with the terrorists. He
managed to get permission for women with babies to be allowed out
of the building. But Fatima Tskayeva wasn’t among them. She
handed Alyona to another female hostage and remained with Makhar
and Kristina.

Someone said they saw her throwing Makhar and some other child
out of the window right after the first blast. She shouted at
them to run away in the Ossetian language, they said. The roof
must have collapsed immediately afterwards and she was allegedly
buried under the debris together with Kristina, who she held
tightly by the foot.

Fatima’s father, Boris Gasinov, thinks that Kristina just didn’t
want to leave her mum. So she didn’t jump out of the window. They
remained there, lying close to each other. But Makhar managed to
escape. After the second blast when the hostages’ relatives
rushed inside the gym, he saw one of his father’s friends and
shouted to him. The man, Albert, heard his call, saw the three
boys hiding near the wall. That was how Ruslan Tskayev’s second
child got rescued.

He didn’t learn his younger daughter Alyona was alive until a
while later.

“My daughter told them Alyona’s name was Pushkina,” says
Klara Gasinova, the mom of late Fatima. “That was how they
put her on the survivors’ list. We saw the list but didn’t guess
it was our granddaughter. But then we realized Pushkin was the
nickname for our son-in-law, Ruslan, whose curly head looked very
much like Pushkin’s. We rushed there to find Alyona safe and
sound.”
They later found out that it was Elbrus Gogichayev, a lieutenant
from the local Interior Ministry’s special force team, who took
her out of the gym under the guns of the terrorists.

He brought the six-month-old girl to the local district
administration office hoping her family would find her there. The
girl hadn’t shed a tear, but when the lieutenant let her out of
his arms she burst out crying. After Elbrus found out her mother
had died, he wanted to adopt her.

“His wife Tamara told us about it,” says the
grandmother. “She found us, Alyona’s grandparents, said they
had two sons and they would like to adopt our girl. She said her
husband couldn’t sit still, thinking about the rescued girl all
the time. We said Alyona had a father and he would never give his
girl away. We haven’t seen Elbrus in these 10 years – he just
phoned us occasionally and asked how Alyona was doing.”

However, they did meet, thanks to Nelly Betcher, a journalist for
the North Ossetia newspaper, who has been following Alyona’s life
over the last 10 years. At the moment of the explosion that took
place on September 3 at 01.05pm, the correspondent was in front
of the school among the hostages’ relatives.

Among her other articles and materials dedicated to the tragic
events, there is a story called: “A six-month-old hostage”
that was written in the aftermath of the incident. The essay was
supplemented with the famous picture of a courageous and strong
man gently holding a fragile baby. She found out his name –
Elbrus Gogichayev. Nelly called him a few times, but he always
refused to meet. “Don’t make a hero of me, I was simply doing my
job. Write about Alyona – her having survived is indeed a
miracle.”“A while after the tragedy, Alyona’s grandmother Klara called
our newspaper office and invited me to Alyona’s birthday – she
turned one on February 19, 2005,” says Nelly. “I could
feel how difficult it was for her. On the one hand, how can there
be celebrations in a house that mourns? But on the other hand,
the youngest survivor of the Beslan tragedy has turned one – how
could they have ignored this symbolic fact? So the father of
Alyona and Makhar, Ruslan Tskayev, decided to gather their
relatives and friends to pay tribute to his dear wife and elder
daughter, and to thank his lucky stars that his other daughter
and son had stayed alive.”

Over time the journalist became really close with the family. She
helped find doctors for Makhar who needed rehab therapy after the
stress he had gone through. The family shared all the news with
her, telling about numerous new playgrounds, named after Alyona,
that were opening around their house, about Makhar becoming a
primary school freshman, about Ruslan starting a new family, and
the time that he, his new wife Sveta and the kids went on
vacation to Turkey. In September 2011, Alyona started school. She
now has a younger brother and sister. The readers of the
newspaper followed these developments in Alyona’s life through
Nelly’s articles.

“When the 10th anniversary of her rescue was
drawing near, I decided to arrange a meeting with Elbrus
Gogichayev,” says Nelly. “It was hard to get hold of
him, since he retired in 2010. In August 2008, Elbrus was in
Tskhinval. Now he’s retired and devotes his time to bringing up
his sons. I called him on the phone, saying that surely he wanted
to meet Alyona and see how she had grown. He replied that he
wanted to see her very much, but was scared to remember those
terrible days. I managed to convince him in the end. The meeting
took place in Fatima’s parents’ house. I came there with Valery
Savlaev, the head of the Crimean Ossetian community 'Alania', who
took a picture of a shy Alyona meeting her savior.”

He didn’t say much and at first glance seemed withdrawn. For ten
years he’s been living with a profound sense of guilt for failing
to save so many people back then. That’s why he doesn’t want to
talk to journalists: what kind of heroes are we, he says, if we
couldn’t save the children? But Valery captured the rare moment
when Elbrus Gogichayev’s face that seemed to remain the same in
the course of all these years lit up with a smile. And the same
strong arms are gently holding a little girl, giving her warmth
and hope, “Everything will be all right, Alyona!”

The school year in Beslan starts on September 5, preceded by days
of mourning. Alyona Tskayeva will be in the 5th grade.
As she’s growing up, she starts to look more and more like her
mother. Born in the same year the terrorist attack took place,
she only learned about it after she started school. Adults in her
family couldn’t bring themselves to tell her how her mother and
older sister died. Once she said to her grandmother with a very
serious expression on her face, “I have a guardian angel that
watches over me from the skies above.”
We saw her outside and gave her the Rossiyskaya Gazeta issue with
the image of her rescue from the besieged school on the front
page. “That’s uncle Elbrus,” Alyona said.

She was holding her little sister Kristina in her arms,
3-year-old Grigory was running around, and Makhar was playing
football nearby. Just an ordinary girl from a big happy family.
She wants to be a doctor, or a hairdresser and loves braiding her
friends’ hair. Now Alyona knows that her life goes on thanks to a
big, strong person, who carried her away from hell ten years ago. Get short URL<